Tag Archives: women’s sexuality

Until we support girls and women in setting boundaries for their own safety and comfort, we cannot accurately describe ourselves as opponents of rape culture.

The core of female oppression is the appropriation of our reproduction, care provision and sexuality by more powerful social sectors, for the purpose of maintaining their power. (In this era, we’re talking men and the capitalist class.) Our speech is discouraged and ignored. We are impeded from shaping society, but society insists on shaping us.

This means that a prerequisite for feminism is supporting women in working out which boundaries we want to set and maintain in support of our political, social and individual needs, as well as safety. Not jeering at girls and women who defend these boundaries. “How are you going to keep the attendance female-born – are you planning on doing panty checks at the door?” has to be one of the most shameful responses to anyone organising a female-only activity*, whether it be commercial, social or political. And yet I was part of a socialist group in which some members did that. It’s one of my more embarrassing memories of the Australian Democratic Socialist Party’s intervention at a Fem X (student feminist) conference in the late nineties, and I don’t think I said anything in response.

As yet we often have no means of ensuring that participants in events specifically for the oppressed always meet the set criteria. But where the event is for women, it’s crucial that we support that intention, rather than jeering at it. Whether we advocate for female autonomy, or ridicule it, has a real impact on the social value placed on women’s boundaries. It will affect how many try deliberately flouting those boundaries because they get a thrill out of it or see it as important to their ego. It will affect whether women who are violated get social support afterwards.

And frankly, “we shouldn’t support women in having any autonomy because we can’t fully achieve it” has to be either one of the stupidest, or most dishonest, stances out there. That sounds to me a lot like you don’t see the value in it because if you did, you’d realise that some respect for boundaries is a hell of a lot better than having hundreds trampling over them.

Of course, we’re taught to respond to the difficulty in achieving social support for female boundaries by rounding in on women, not on those who want to violate them. It’s easier to criticise those with less social power, isn’t it. Tell us we have the wrong position.

As will be clear to some reading this, this is especially topical. Right now, the organisers of an Australian commercial event, Seven Sisters Festival, are copping criticism** on news sites which detail the ‘transphobia’ of an event which told some prospective participants that the event is for women and post-op transwomen only.

This venting, often by those on the political Left, even takes the form of accusing the organisers of wanting to check people’s genitals. It should be clear to anyone with a semblance of feminist politics that making accusations that women want to look at or touch someone’s genitals is – outside of specific contexts, such as making out – sexual harassment. It is especially bad to make this accusation when their hypothetical ‘victim’ of enforced panty-checks would be the transgressor of female boundaries in that scenario.

Women on the Seven Sisters Festival Facebook event page experienced a fair amount of such sexual harassment. It would be great if the political Left developed the politics required to recognise and combat this sort of misogyny (reading that link is important), even though this particular commercial enterprise is unlikely to interest most socialists at least. My experience is that much of this Left does not recognise sexual harassment, nor understand its gendered nature. That is, that it flows from and reinforces the power males as a sex have over females, especially on the sexual/reproductive axis. It is not a gender-neutral activity, although males also deserve not to be targetted by it.

Female-only spaces are not inherently free from disability inaccessibility, racism or awful politics. Defending women’s boundaries does not mean agreement with all individual female-only spaces or processes. But if you don’t think that even the politically worst women-only group deserves to be defended from male sexual aggression, you’re no feminist. And isn’t it about time women were free from the constant “transwomen, transwomen” derailment of the many important issues affecting us.

**There is also criticism of the Festival as being inappropriate towards indigenous cultures, and some of this does appear to be valid. And in general, the commercial nature of the event means various kinds of deficiencies, so that it is not especially worthwhile for women to invest much in it – and racialised women especially should not be expected to. The point of this piece is to oppose the enabling of sexual harassment.

Most feminists believe we live in a patriarchal society, although opinions vary as to what that means. The major feminist stream known as ‘radical feminism’ attaches a particular political theory and approach to this. Some feminists simply use the word as a substitute for ‘sexist’.

How do marxists see this?

We don’t see ‘patriarchy’ as a useful catch-all term to describe every ruling elite and class-based economic form that depends on women’s oppression.

We believe it’s very inaccurate and prevents feminists from accurately assessing and opposing the dynamics maintaining our oppression.

Briefly:
Patriarchy was a very early form of class society that involved two crucial dynamics:
1. Male family heads having legal decision-making power over their women, children and family property.
2. The patriarchs, as a social sector, being incorporated into the decision-making processes of society as a whole. [Note: this does not imply absolute equality amongst the patriarchs.]

But 1. no longer holds, except in an altered way in a few countries. While men do retain much of this power in reality, it takes a different form – it is no longer legally mandated.
And 2. is not the case, since only a few men (in the capitalist class and amongst their political servants in governments) have the power to make decisions for society, regardless of the illusions of bourgeois parliamentary democracy. Being a father no longer confers that right/power.

So patriarchy theory disguises the current state of women’s oppression – and prevents us from relating well enough to the factors maintaining it, which these days are much less inscribed in law, although still very powerful.

Patriarchy theory often also dissuades its proponents from looking at who the ruling class in our society is (the capitalists/ bourgeoisie), deeming it instead ‘men’, despite most men not having the power to rule society.

It does matter what the ruling class is. It affects the way society works. [Eg capitalism or feudalism? It does matter.]

Capitalism has created entirely new forms of female oppression. The porn industry as we know it wouldn’t exist without capitalism. As advanced capitalist industries do, it creates demand. And its images are nothing like the pre-capitalist paintings of nude women – they are now images of actual women, which continue to be sold and bought long after the image’s subject/object has died.

Industry as a whole needs different classes of workers, to play us off against each other, with some paid much less. And capitalism needs women to do unpaid work (including rearing the next generation of workers) within the hetero family unit in order for the capitalists to keep more of society’s wealth, rather than devoting it to these important welfare tasks.]

[This is not to say that men won’t in general try to maintain their (relative) material privilege via exerting power over the women around them. Male privilege under capitalism is very real, despite it being less inscribed in law than it used to be. Any socially privileged sector has an immediate objective interest in maintaining that privilege, and capitalism inherited the pre-capitalist sex and sexual relations of male dominance and female subjugation, although it has altered those relations in its own interest. Consequently, female sexuality remains largely subordinate to the political and economic needs of the ruling class (as it has been to the ruling classes of all economic forms), and men maintain their historical role as main gatekeepers and immediate beneficiaries of women’s sexuality. The implementation of this (including the extent to which a woman’s sexuality is determined by her own wishes and enjoyment) varies enormously around the world, which will have to be a subject for a future post.]

And while it has been true that the ruling classes of all types of class society have mainly comprised men, it doesn’t follow that all or even most men are part of the ruling economic class.

This is another reason why conflating capitalism (a women-oppressing system) with patriarchy just confuses us. It can lead to writing off any mention of the role of the capitalist class with (‘well, men created capitalism – it’s part of the patriarchy’). But it is vital to acknowledge that the capitalist class has political interests outside the objective interests of most men. Since knowledge is power, it utterly disorients us, and significantly demobilises us from key aspects of the fight, to assume that discussing and opposing capitalism *specifically* is pointless.

We also recognise that employing terms simply because they are perceived as “stronger language” is not inherently a radical approach; in fact it can impede recognition of the limitations of this method. Political strength of oppressed movements is aided by accuracy of terms and analysis, so that we can better orient our strategies for liberation.

Interesting reading, from ‘Patriarchy or class?’ (1988) by Rose McCann (Chapter 2). The ‘socialist feminism’ referred to is in contrast to marxist feminism, and was created by feminists who were only familiar with the reductionist/ Stalinist (conservative) distortions of Marxism:

~

Socialist feminism’s starting point – the alleged inadequacy of Marxism in providing a theoretical explanation of women’s oppression and a program for combating it – is based on an extremely distorted interpretation of Marxism. A crude, dogmatic, eclectic caricature is presented as Marxism and then knocked down as inadequate to the task of explaining women’s oppression.

Having rejected Marxist analysis, socialist feminism then sets up the concept of patriarchy as the centrepiece of its viewpoint…. Relations between men and women are said to have their own, independent logic, dynamic and history that do not stand in any necessary or contingent relationship to the prevailing relations of production.

While Marxists reject the underlying philosophical idealism of such a view, this does not mean that they accept the vulgarised, mechanical view often presented as the materialist alternative. Although relations between men and women are historically and materially incomprehensible in isolation from the context of the prevailing relations of production, relations between the sexes cannot simply be reduced to economic/ class relations.

In any society, relations between the sexes do have a substantially autonomous dynamic, influenced by non-economic relations and the social consciousness these relations generate (political, moral, religious, and other ideas).

….

The Marxist (or historical materialist) approach does not deny that all known class societies have oppressed women. Nor does it dispute the fact that the capitalist system is male-dominated and that male privilege is a central feature of it. Marxism emphatically agrees that men dominate virtually all aspects of capitalist economic, political and social life, and that capitalist society is riddled with degenerate sexist attitudes. It also agrees that a by-product of this is the oppression of individual women by individual men. Sometimes individual men can be responsible for extreme violence against women.

But none of this proves that patriarchy is an autonomous structure with its own history, laws of motion, and material base separate from the class relations associated with exploitative relations of production.

The ongoing socialist revolution in Cuba is an inspiring example of what can be achieved for women’s rights when the capitalist agenda no longer dictates. From 1959, when the Cuba Revolution achieved political victory over the US-backed Batista dictatorship, women have both defeated preconceptions that they can’t be revolutionary leaders, and helped their country lead the world in the areas of feminism, environmental sustainability, political participation, health and education.

The brutality of the Batista regime propelled many women to join the revolutionary struggle. Their initial roles in non-combatant underground work and caring for the male soldiers did not satisfy many of the women and they demanded equality in the armed struggle, against the opposition of many of the men. Fidel Castro spent one seven-hour meeting persuading leading opponents that women had the discipline (in fact, more of it) – and also the right – to fulfil this role . The women’s platoon of the Rebel Army became known for its discipline and courage, sometimes leading ahead where men feared to go. Thus it was early in the revolution that many men were forced to change their opinion of women’s capabilities.

On January 2, 1959, the day after the general strike which forced Batista and his cronies to flee Havana for the US, Castro called for the end of women’s oppression and – for their full participation in the nascent revolution. “A people whose women fight alongside men – that people is invincible”, he avowed in a speech from the Santiago de Cuba city hall. However, the expectations that both men and women generally held at that time were those of the capitalist world. The capitalists needed working-class women to assume primary responsibility for unpaid domestic labour in rearing the next generation of workers so as to reduce pressure on the capitalist state to direct wealth towards social welfare and away from private profits. They therefore promoted the view that women’s “natural” social role was being mothers/carers subordinate to their husbands – the “breadwinner” – within each individual family unit.

General acceptance that working women should be restricted to low-status and low paid work was also important in reinforcing the idea that women primarily belonged in “the home”. Capitalist dominance of the media and other cultural products, capitalist laws and the influence of the Roman Catholic Church in Cuba all helped reinforce these ideas. The Cuban revolutionaries recognised that the impact of capitalism’s needs and the sexist ideas it promoted on women’s lives was so far-reaching and oppressive that fundamental changes were needed.

From the beginning of Cuba’s new revolutionary democracy, women assumed leadership roles, involving themselves in the popular militias to defend the revolution, and in the neighbourhood-based Committees in Defence of the Revolution. But this initial demonstration of women’s leadership capacity was recognised as inadequate for eradicating the discrimination against women that was thoroughly ingrained into Cuban social life. A group of women revolutionaries founded what was to become the main women’s rights organisation in Cuba, to build on the gains for women made during the struggle against Batista.

The Federation of Cuban Women (FMC), a non-government organisation open to all women over the age of 14 and numbering nearly 4 million, organises at every level of society. The FMC works on various issues directly affecting women such as access to jobs and domestic violence. The Cuban constitution guarantees it an “advisory” role in the formulation of government policy, and the National Assembly of People’s Power tends to adopt most of its proposals. It is hard to find a comparable situation in any other country.

Partly via the FMC, women led the revolution from its early days, spearheading national literacy and health campaigns in which tens of thousands of FMC members led other Cubans in health and literacy brigades to rural areas, helping the rural workers and peasants in their daily work while teaching them to read and educating them about disease prevention, and decreasing infant and maternal mortality rates. As a result of the 1961 national campaign, the Cuban adult literacy rate increased from 75% in 1959 to 96% by the end of 1961. Today, the literacy rate is 99.8% and Cuba leads the world in the ration of female to male enrolments at all educational levels, at 121%.

And Cuba now has an outstanding health system which places a high priority on women’s needs. Women have access to many forms of contraception, and abortion is legal and accessible. Very few people in Cuba have HIV or AIDS, and less than a quarter of those are women. All healthcare is free, a remarkable achievement given that the criminal US blockade on Cuba includes a trade ban, 90% of which encompasses medical supplies and food. The UN Statistics Division records the infant mortality rate at four per thousand, lower than the US rate of six per thousand.

Children are educated about sex in Cuba from the elementary level, and encouraged to develop attitudes about sex that encompass mutual respect, the idea of sex as human expression, and safer sex. This stands in sharp contrast to the sexist moralism of pre-socialist capitalist relations, which embraced the sexual double-standard, tended to treat women as sexual objects, and threw women to the fate of enforced child-rearing or backyard abortions. Divorces are easily obtainable and usually initiated by women.

The Cuban Revolution also took steps to get women out of prostitution, providing them with alternative livelihoods. Revolutionary Cuba has heavy penalties for pimping. Prostitution was nearly eradicated, until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The USSR was previously Cuba’s largest trading partner, on which Cuba had enormous reliance as a consequence of the crippling US economic blockade. With Cuba’s increased reliance on international tourism to earn foreign currency, the problem of prostitution and sexist advertising to promote tourism re-emerged.

One response by the National Assembly was the adoption of the FMC’s proposed measures to reduce sexist advertising. The FMC has also implemented outreach programs to the women engaged in prostitution, and made other recommendations to the government about adjusting its legal responses and overseas advertising to tourists. The lasting power of centuries of sexist socialisation under capitalism also gives the Cuban Revolution ongoing feminist tasks. Men still fail to take enough responsibility for contraception and don’t avail themselves of the free vasectomies available to them. It is not only sex tourists to Cuba, but also some Cuban men, who believe it is acceptable to hire women to deliver them sexual pleasure.

Writing of Cuba’s approach to the misogynist violence it inherited from the capitalist world, Cuba solidarity activist Donna Goodman explains in the March 2009 Dissident Voice that, “Crimes of violence against women, especially rape and sexual assault, are severely punished in Cuba. The Federation of Cuban Women travels the country to find out if there is hidden violence and to set up mechanisms for reporting and for community intervention.” She notes that discrimination based on gender, ethnicity or religious preference is outlawed by the Cuban constitution, and further laws back other measures of gender equality.

Although most Cubans no longer hold the pre-revolutionary attitude that women should stay at home and not engage in broader society, the assumption that women should assume most responsibility for domestic tasks is enduring. Some Cubans have been reluctant to elect women to some of the national leadership bodies because they think their domestic responsibilities would impede their leadership activity. One response to this problem was the 1975 Family Code, which set into law equal participation in domestic tasks. Another response has been the “best candidate” media campaign run by the FMC, aimed at urging voters not to allow historical expectations to affect their decisions. Cuban feminist leaders recognise the importance of continuing this work to change ingrained attitudes.

Despite this, Cuba still leads on most feminist measures. As a consequence of decades of taking women seriously as revolutionary leaders, it has the third-highest proportion globally of parliamentary seats (in a lower or single house) held by women, at 43%. As of December 2010, the US rate is 17% and Australia’s is 25%. Women represent 49.5% of all graduates at higher educational levels and 62% of university students.

In 1956 women made up only 17% of the paid workforce. Today they comprise 46.7%. This is partly enabled by the FMC which runs free childcare services for children under seven years – a far cry from Australia’s expensive childcare. And unlike in Australia, women don’t tend to take the worst-paid jobs – 65.1% of professional and technical staff, and 43% of scientists are women. They also comprise 51% of Cuba’s doctors. In fact, efforts to get women to study medicine were so successful that in 1999, when over 70% of medicine graduates were women, Cuba had to introduce quotas for men!